I have a response to The Atlantic‘s cover story Does Facebook Make Us Lonely? up at BostInno. Here’s a snippet: Is Facebook making us lonely? That’s the question posed by The Atlantic‘s new cover story, and if you’re interested in learning more about the nature of loneliness and its prevalance in American life, I recommend you give …

This is a great scene. Not only is it a funny combination, but if you’re like me you may actually be a bit moved in favor of Timeline. But would Don really favor it? Or would he agree with this guy that forgetting is important? It is, after all, what his life is based around. …

A friend asked me recently what I think of Facebook’s new plan to unveil a new media sharing platform on their site. Dan Gillmor’s column in The Guardian captures most of my thoughts thus far: If you buy a refrigerator for your home, it’s yours. And once installed, it’s going to work the same way …

Eli Pariser, president of the board at MoveOn.org, has a new book out called The Filter Bubble, and based on his recent NYT op-ed and some interviews he’s done I’m extremely excited to read it. Pariser hits on one of my pet issues: the danger of Facebook, Google, etc. personalizing our news feeds in a way that …

I’ve written about the potential dangers of Google and Facebook using algorithms to recommend news, with the basic fear being that they’ll recommend stories that confirm my biases rather than “feed me my vegetables.” But Nieman Lab has an interview with the founder of Google News who has quite a different take on what he’s …

I had a post months back called “Who will feed me my vegetables?” about the dangers of social news feeds. Here was the gist: Consider politics. Facebook knows I self-designate as “liberal”. They know I’m a “fan” of Barack Obama and the Times’ Nick Kristof. They can see I’m more likely to “like” stories from …

Vanity Fair published a piece this week on a lawsuit against the Huffington Post by two Democratic political consultants “for failing to acknowledge what they claim was their critical role in the creation of the Huffington Post”. Politico reported the story about two months ago under the headline “2 Dems claim Arianna Huffington stole website …

I’ve blogged about this before, but I wanted to share a great post from Ed Glaeser at NYT’s Economix on how social networking – in this case Facebook – supplements in-person interaction, rather than replacing it: it isn’t clear if Facebook will increase or decrease the demand for face-to-face interactions.When theory is ambiguous, we need …

My friend and former colleague Andrea Zak comments on my post on Facebook’s news algorithms, over at her blog: This technology-induced bubble is particularly problematic in that it is human nature to accept facts and opinions that align with personal beliefs and disregard information that clashes. Exactly right. Just to complicate things a bit more, …

After my last post, I had a few conversations with friends about a categorized or sortable Facebook feed. The point of my post was as much about how Facebook could have better managed the transition from profiles to feeds as it was about categorizing updates, but the latter was, for whatever reason, what I ended …